She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [156]
On the overhead projector, he displayed photos of Steve and Celeste at their wedding, on rafting trips to Colorado, in Hong Kong and San Francisco, and at the lake on their matching wave runners. Then Celeste had a breakdown, caused by post-traumatic stress from years of sexual abuse when she was a child. She tried to kill herself, and met Tracey Tarlton in the psychiatric unit at St. David’s.
There, he said, they became friends. He showed pictures of the two women at the wedding in Atlanta and at the lake house party Celeste threw for Tracey. He described it not as a lover’s gift but a favor for a friend, because “Tracey’s house wasn’t big enough.” On the screen he projected a snapshot of Celeste and Tracey dancing.
Yet, in the world DeGuerin portrayed, the relationship on Celeste’s part was never more than platonic. The two women had never been lovers.
Perhaps DeGuerin didn’t know how openly the women had courted. Or he may have felt hamstrung by his client, who insisted to him as she had to Steve, “I don’t eat at the Y.” Of course, proving Tracey had lied about the nature of the relationship offered an intriguing upside for DeGuerin. The question before the jury wasn’t if Celeste and Tracey were lovers or friends, only if they conspired to kill Steve. Yet disproving Tracey’s story of the love affair would brand her a liar. It then wouldn’t be difficult for him to persuade the jurors to view her entire testimony as a lie.
DeGuerin then brought out the written evidence, bits he’d pulled from the journals and cards to bolster his version. First: a note from Timberlawn, where Celeste wrote to Tracey, “I just want to be your friend. Nothing more.” Second: a snatch of Tracey’s voluminous psychiatric reports, the day she’d said all her problems would be solved “if a certain person met with an untimely death.”
Where Wetzel’s conclusion had been that Celeste loaded Tracey with anger toward Steve and then pointed her, as one might a gun, at her husband, DeGuerin took the opposite stance. The relationship, everything Tracey said about Celeste’s involvement, was all a fabrication of Tarlton’s sickness.
“It’s just in Tracey’s mind,” he said.
He admitted Celeste’s actions in the months following her husband’s death would raise eyebrows. “She drank, partied, spent money, she mutilated herself,” he said. “She threatened Tracey.” Yet, no matter what, it was all unimportant, because Steve, he insisted, hadn’t died of a complication from the gunshot wound but an unrelated infection. It was the argument that worried Wetzel the most, that he’d be able to rewrite the autopsy and change Steve Beard’s cause of death.
“The state’s evidence will make Celeste look bad,” he admitted. “It will make her look like a gold digger.”
But he wanted the jurors to remember: To believe a confessed killer like Tracey Tarlton, the state had to have corroborative evidence. DeGuerin said the evidence they would present was tainted. The sources, particularly the twins, were clouded with suspicion. They were after Steve’s money, he said. And the only way they could get their hands on it was to get rid of their mother. “Corroborative evidence must show Celeste was involved in the commission of the crime,” DeGuerin concluded. “It is not enough to just make her look bad.”
Before he sat down, DeGuerin looked at the jurors and made one last statement: “Celeste Beard is not guilty.”
In the front two rows behind the prosecutors sat the elder Beard children, Becky, Paul and his wife Kim, and Steve III. They’d waited three years for this day in court. Paul glanced at Celeste, remembering the one time he’d seen her before, with his father on their visit in Virginia. That day, she’d catered to Steve and acted as if she loved him. Now, Paul judged, like so much else in Celeste’s life, it had all been a sham.
Next to the Beard children sat Ellen Halbert, the prosecutor’s head of victim assistance. Steve’s friends filed in, including the Baumans, eager to see